Of the many weapons, both physical and imaginary, employed during the
interminable 105-minute running time of Rag and Bone, perhaps the most
vicious is the symbol. So often does playwright Noah Haidle employ
this device that it seems as if not merely every line of dialogue but
also the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater itself are encased in a giant
pair of quotation marks.

A ladder to heaven. A poet who cannot feel. An aspiring businessman
who traffics in human hearts. A money-minded, soul-bereft
millionaire. There's even the requisite prostitute with a heart of
gold who, in a daring twist, has a pimp with a heart of platinum. Not
a single thing here is either what it appears to be or only what it
appears to be, except for the script itself, which resembles and is an
Adam Rapp play without the brutal creative imagination behind it. Two
of this play's actors, Michael Chernus and Matthew Stadelmann, even
appeared in the last Rattlestick production, which was
(coincidentally?) Rapp's own American Sligo.

That they're playing nearly identical characters here, and not nearly
as well, is the least of the show's troubles. Far more damaging is
that Rag and Bone is the laziest kind of theatrical writing, that
which confuses meaning with content and ends up with none of either.

Haidle faced a similar problem in his 2005 play Mr. Marmalade, in
which a young girl warped by daytime television coped with a fantasy
life far removed from the innocence we normally associate with
childhood. Yet even in those bizarre surroundings, there were
occasional moments of quiet and insight, when the dangers of trying to
escape into an imaginary world were driven home with arresting
clarity. Rag and Bone attempts to cover the same basic territory, but
without possessing 10 consecutive seconds of dramatic or emotional
honesty. As a result, its central sextet of woozy idealists resemble
actual human beings in appearance only.

Henry Stram and Matthew Stadelman.Photo by Sandra Coudert.

The six caricatures in search of an author comprise the prostitute
(Deirdre O'Connell) and her pimp (Kevin Jackson), the poet (Henry
Stram), the millionaire (David Wohl), and the two brothers who own The
Ladder Store (Chernus and Stadelmann) and are intent on helping the
others get where they want to go. Chernus plays heart dealer George,
who steals his inventory from elementary school teachers, public
defenders, and even the poet, but also kept the one that belonged to
the now-deceased mother that brother Jeff so adored. Of course nearly
all of this is of some theoretical or metaphysical importance.

But except for vague references to problematic mother-son
relationships and the stop-the-presses revelation that we tend to miss
people when they die, there are no messages in Rag and Bone. There
are just piles of cheap excuses for characters to walk around spouting
aphorisms like "That's what the heart's meant to do: break" and "This
whole world is cold once we're out of our mamas," and a second act
that does nothing more than ramblingly restate Haidle's countless,
pointless points.

None of this makes for much of an acting showcase, though Stram and
Jackson burnish their dullish enough to distinguish them partially
from their indistinct surroundings. O'Connell, too, is fun to watch,
but I'm positive I've seen her pull all these same tricks before - her
particular brand of cynically bemused distraction was time-tested
three shows ago, and is not particularly organic to her character
here. Nor is Chernus's laid-back-hippy take on George (and eventually
George's mother, in the play's most fraught development), or adult
Stadelmann's unbearable interpretation of Jeff as an eight-year-old
sufferer of Asperger syndrome.

In fairness, one can't really blame the actors, or even director Sam
Gold, whose restless, mad-scientist-style staging further ensures the
pieces won't come together. They're doing what they can in service of
a show that can't come alive onstage because it can't come alive at
all: Rag and Bone is a work that more than any in recent memory was
written to be pondered but not played, analyzed but not enjoyed,
significant but not substantive. Haidle's masturbatory exercise in
metaphorical tedium achieves its only goal of getting you thinking,
but only about all the more productive ways you could be spending your
time.